Lionel Shriver Quotes

You've got to write for your audience.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

I think HBO seems to have an extraordinary clever knack of catching the pulse of its audience. It really, really knows its audience.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

You've got to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is thinking, and know what they'll accept from you.

When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

I'm a commercial director; I do some very very commercial stuff in the commercial world. My music videos are always analyzed. I need to think about what the audience is going to think.

We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.

That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.

No one reads to hear someone complain about the weather or how poorly their children are behaving. You have to give the readers a reason to turn the page. As a writer you have to invite someone to turn the page. And that is a skill you have to refine. That is why you have to read. You have to read to learn what it is that makes people turn the page.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.

I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

No matter what you write, it's a matter of putting words in a certain order so that the reader will be interested in what you're writing.